Socialism and War

The Attitude of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party Towards the War

*

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

This pamphlet was written in the summer of 1915, just before
the Zimmerwald
Conference.[1] It also appeared in German and French, and was
reprinted in full in Norwegian in the organ of the Norwegian
Social-Democratic youth league. The German edition of the pamphlet was
secretly smuggled into Germany - into Berlin, Leipzig, Bremen and other
cities, where it was secretly distributed by supporters of the Zimmerwald
Left and by the Karl Liebknecht group. The French edition was secretly
printed in Paris and distributed there by the French Zimmerwaldists. The
Russian edition reached Russia in a very limited quantity, and in Moscow
was copied out by hand by workers.

We are now reprinting this pamphlet in full as a document. The reader
must remember all the time that the pamphlet was written in August 1915.
This must be remembered particularly in connection with those passage which
refer to Russia: Russia at that time was still tsarist, Romanov Russia.

Notes

[1]Zimmerwald
Conference – the first conference of internationalist
socialists, held in Zimmerwald, Switzerland, on September 5-8, 1915. A
struggle flared up at the conference between the Kautskyite majority and
the revolutionary internationalists headed by Lenin. At the conference,
Lenin organised the internationalists into the Zimmerwald Left group.

The conference adopted a manifesto which exposed the
imperialist nature of the world war, denounced the “Socialists”
for voting for war credits and for participating in the bourgeois
governments and called on the workers of the European countries to wage
struggles against the war and to strive for the conclusion of peace without
annexation or payment of indemnities.

The conference also adopted a resolution expressing
sympathy for war victims and elected the International Socialist Committee
(I.S.C.). For an appraisal of the conference, see Lenin’s articles
The First Step and Revolutionary Marxists at the International
Socialist Conference, September 5-8, 1915 (V.I. Lenin,
Collected Works, Eng. ed., International Publishers, New
York 1930, Vol.XVIII, pp.40-45, 346-49).